German Studies: New Perspectives Speaker Series“What can I hope?”: Race, Abyssal Aesthetics, and the Failure of Beauty
Date and Time:
February 20, 2025 05:00PM – 06:30PM
Location:
Barker Center, Room 133
Speaker: Jessica Ruffin
Assistant Professor of Film and Media in the Literature Section at MIT
This talk addresses the function of the beautiful in accounts of aesthetic and ethical intersubjectivity. Immanuel Kant’s racialized ideal of human beauty and morality affords an interrogation of colorblind optimism. Engaging the promise of beauty as that of abstraction from the ground of phenomenal experience, I contend with beauty’s failure amidst ongoing histories of racialization and white supremacy. As an alternative to abstraction as transcendence, I turn to Frantz Fanon, Arthur Schopenhauer, and my own embodiment to refigure abstraction as abyssal descent.